Beta Feature
We're currently testing replacement products with a select group of brands. Reach out if you'd like to enable it on your account!
What is a Replacement Product?
Sometimes orders may contain products that you don't intend for customers to order again, like samples or seasonal products. With Replacement Products, you can swap those products out for others across Repeat events and carts.
Products are replaced in customer-facing surfaces, but the original product will still be used to calculate timing and identify customer Moments. When it comes time to communicate to the customer, the replacement takes the place of the original.
A replacement product will be shown in place of the original in the following places:
The Repeat cart
Due to Reorder
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When to Use Replacement Products
There are many reasons you may want to map a product to a replacement. Most often, it's a product that's great for acquisition purposes but is not relevant to retention marketing efforts.
A loss leader product - A product that is great for convincing a customer to trial your brand, but due to low or negative margins you don’t want returning customers buying it.
Starter kits - One item in a kit or bundle is replenishable by nature, and the others aren’t (for example, a starter kit with a razor handle and a pack of razor blabes). You don’t want customers coming back for the hardware, only for the refills and replenishable products.
Samples - You might include multiple samples in your orders. You don’t want samples included in recommendations but you would love to have the sample product direct to the full-size version.
Outdated product versions - If you have recently changed your product, you still want those items to trigger retention efforts but you want to direct customers to the latest version.
Seasonal products - Great for building hype, but only around for a limited time. When the seasonal product is gone, direct customers to a similar mainstay product.
Bundles - Bundles are not yet supported with replacement products since we are not able to map a product to multiple other products.
Defining Replacement Products
You can set up replacement products on the "Products" tab of the Repeat Shopify app:
From there, search or select a product that you would like to replace. Once you click on the product, you can choose what product should replace it:
Once the replacement product has been mapped you will see a visual summary of the product you are currently editing and the product that will now replace it:
Frequently Asked Questions
Can one product be a replacement for multiple other products?
Yes. If you have multiple dated versions of packaging, for example, you could have all of those products point to the same replacement product. Simply follow the steps above for each of the products you would like to have replaced.
When a product is the replacement product for another, that information is displayed in a table that will show all products that are currently pointing to it:
What happens if a replacement product is also replaced?
Repeat will only follow one layer of replacements. That means if Product A is replaced by Product B, and Product B is replaced by Product C, the customer who buys A will be shown B.
This is to prevent creating circular or dead-end relationships where the chain of replacements ends up being broken or going in circles forever. In these cases, we could not show a product to a customer at all.